Tuesday, December 1, 2015

I really like the contradictions in the King's Man- it's a model covered in faces that's faceless, and it's an automaton that has personality.

I focused on a solidly warm but natural set of colors- the armor has a lot of bone mixed in; the armor, cloth, and white also have a lot of brown; I painted the cloak almost exclusively with washes so I could get a red that had almost no orange in its highlights, to avoid a more modern/clean red.

Outside of said natural warms, the only non-warm color is the metal on the halberd shaft, there's green in the armor shading (thanks, color theory), and the only bit without off-white at brightest was the lantern/ball thing.

I think these guys are a lot of fun since, with the heavy emphasis on body horror *spoiler*

and them being made out of inside-out people turned metal

*/spoiler* I think they give great flexibility for painting them, since you can move towards warm or cool metal, bone, or gore, and just about anything more outlandish, 'cause, well, evil magic.

The continuing adventures at "Home?"

Year 7
We got nicknames again, and only neutral or positive results, which was a plus.

We tried to get ammonia, but got Family, which is nice for weapon training and the tech tree, but not immediately good. We were now sitting on a ton of non-leather, non-specialized hide, and didn't really want more rawhide (we'd saved more instead of kitting out our guys last time, in order to get either), and some bone but no weapons we really wanted.

We ended up building a weapon crafter but couldn't buy anything at it.

We hadn't been dying much, but we'd continued that poor luck regarding trying to make any sort of progress in this settlement. Our third year in a row with neutral or negative gear progress. It ain't lookin' pretty. With every building we can access unlocked, we set out on another hunt, to hopefully be able to make something we want.

We then slaughtered a lion and its cub.

Year 8
We had a nice triathlon where nothing bad happened. Also, somewhere in this year, one of our initial survivors (Kaneda!!) hit all sorts of events, which, combined with what he already had, somehow turned him into a beater without any of us really noticing, being able to hit offensive stats of 3/6+/10, or for those of you who aren't familiar with the rules, he'll swing an axe really hard and fast.

We finally started running smoothly after the second lion fight. We finally got Ammonia back. And we were able to make some decent armor, a giant sword, and an oversized axe.

We had one more fight before we needed to face a King's Man.

An antelope went down quickly, and luckily had its bladder intact...

Year 9
...so we could make blood paint for the upcoming fight. We also progressed towards our leather armor set and made another knife for the express purpose of stabbing the king's man.

We fought said Man with some babies and a young Katar specialist, and on our third settlement finally defeated the last of our undefeated level 1 monsters!

Our deck manipulator and general assist Survivor got killed as our survival was nearly running out except for hers, and we got unlucky a couple times, but managed to scrape by with three limping survivors. One of whom got some scary armor, and then the Knight returned, and unfortunately judged the survivor with a death clock worthy of bearing a sword he'd not get the training to use properly, which also broke our bone build, what with a sword being made of metal.

Year 10
We decided to try fighting a level 2 antelope for the first time this year, and stomped it pretty well, though not after suffering some disorders and a chomped arm (our punching expert punched it in its mouth... turns out, that's not a good idea).

We got scrap smelting and got 1 bone away from a blacksmith!

Year 11
We went after a chumpy little level 1 lion because we wanted an easy target to train our twilight swordsman (which, we later realized, was inconsequential).

It went down predictably easily.

We got everything we needed for a Blacksmith, an endeavor, and close to enough for some blacksmith gear!

Year 12
Then we had a goddamn party that ate all of our resources. We should have been aware of the chance from last time (and I'd have probably argued it wasn't worth leaving anything valuable unspent since I tend to plan conservatively), but it's still obnoxiously high odds for a major setback.

We decided to try Romantic instead of Barbaric as our conviction, since we felt we had enough strength going around.

We then fought another level 2 Antelope since the last fight was interesting.

We got some awful luck and ran out of most of our survival variously before the game started, and our great weapon fighter died in the first seconds of combat. We then had a conservative/uphill fight that eventually worked out. We also broke yet another bone axe on a stupid Antelope. (I think this is our fourth item to break on one?)